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Apple Augmented Reality Glasses Could Start Production Earlier than 2020

Super accurate analyst Ming-Chi Kuo anticipates that Apple AR glasses will enter manufacturing later this year or Q2 in 2020.
Susan Fourtané
| Apr 29, 2019 12:43 PM EST
Created: Apr 29, 2019 12:43 PM EST
Updated: Sep 30, 2021 07:43 AM EST
innovation
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Susan Fourtané 

It is no secret that Apple Inc. has been working on Augmented Reality (AR) for several years now. Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear that the company is deeply interested in Augmented Reality development. He has also said that Augmented Reality is the future of computing.

Everything seems to point in the direction that Apple is going to start production of Augmented Reality glasses that would be paired with the next iPhones by late 2019 or 2020. 

"Simply put, we believe Augmented Reality is going to change the way we use technology forever." - Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc

Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, a financial services group in the Asia-Pacific region, believes that Apple's Augmented Reality headset would begin mass production the second quarter of next year, if not Q4 2019.

Ming-Chi Kuo is well known globally for being surprisingly accurate in his predictions concerning Apple. Kuo is one of the most reliable sources on future Apple products the company's future plans. He gathers his insight from contacts in Apple's supply chain in Asia and converts that information into research analysis. 

The headset would be a light smart screen set to interact with the iPhone. It would follow the elegant and minimalistic design characteristic of all Apple products. 

Apple's ARKit first: AR glasses next

In June 2017, Apple announced the ARKit, the company's cutting-edge platform for developing Augmented Reality apps for iPhone and iPad, at WWDC as part of iOS 11. This was later updated as part of iOS 12. Apple's AR glasses are the logical next step to the ARKit.

With ARKit developers can learn how to add high-end Augmented Reality capabilities for positional tracking and scene understanding to their applications.

With the ARKit 2 developers are able to integrate vivid Augmented Reality experiences and enable applications to interact with the user's environment in the real world in completely new ways.

In all Apple fashion, multiple iOS devices can simultaneously view an AR scene or play multiplayer AR games that will be available this fall on the recently announced Apple Arcade gaming platform.  

What is attractive about this is that developers don't have to develop the Augmented Reality system to be able to create AR applications for the iPhone and iPad. 

Augmented Reality glasses --not to be confused with Virtual Reality headsets-- are see-through glasses that let you see the world around you through them as well as the images that are displayed in front of your eyes. In other words, they augment your real environment. 

Apple's latest iPhones are well equipped for Augmented Reality. The latest smartphones include bionic chipsets, the kind that enables Augmented Reality processing, and this is coupled with the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X and iPhone XS, and iOS 12: "The world's largest Augmented Reality platform," according to Apple.